Does the Drinking “Hangover” Come from Sleeping Over a Rope?

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Noah. I’m from Charleston, South Carolina.

Hey, Noah.

Hi, Noah. Welcome to the show.

I’m calling y’all today with a question about the word hangover.

Hangover. Is this something you’re experiencing at the moment?

No, we were in the process of working on one when we came up with the idea, though.

Me and my girlfriend were out at the bar having a discussion, and she had said she had heard something about it being from a way that you could pay to sleep in an old English work camp where you had to hang from a rope all night.

And she was saying that she had heard that’s where the word came from.

And we love the show, so we thought it would be the perfect opportunity to call in and ask y’all to answer our question.

Oh, wow.

Yeah, so this gives us a chance to talk about a couple, two different kinds of hangovers.

And they’re both, well, pretty good stories.

The kind of hangover your girlfriend was talking about sometimes was called a penny hang or just a hangover.

But it’s not the origin of the alcohol hangover.

There’s an excellent description of this in George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, which he published in 1933.

And I’m going to quote from it here.

He writes, at the two-penny hangover, the lodgers sit in a row on a bench.

There is a rope in front of them, and they’d lean on this as though leaning over a fence.

A man, humorously called the valet, cuts the rope at five in the morning.

And then he quotes a man who goes by the name of Bozo as saying, quote, it was more comfortable than it sounded, better than bare floor.

So imagine sitting on a bench with your arms hanging over the rope or leaning on the rope.

So it’s not like the rope is at your waist and you’re hanging over it like laundry.

It’s not quite like that.

So it’s true that people who were very poor and very drunk could pay a few pennies to sleep off the alcohol in a place like this in London and some other places.

But it isn’t the source of hangover.

It’s just a different kind of hangover.

The word hangover already existed and was used for other things.

Recently, we can talk about other hangovers like a hangover from, say, a political event or a world event like a war or a pandemic that still affects our decisions or actions now.

And so we just it’s a general hangover became a specific hangover.

So that’s why we have the alcohol hangovers.

That makes sense.

Often this happens in language where we have specialization, where a general term becomes specific and then kind of pushes out all the other meanings.

And that’s what happened here with the alcohol hangover.

So the hangover with the headache is the effects hanging over into the next day.

That’s exactly right.

Right.

It’s more something hanging above you than you hanging over an object.

That is exactly right.

Well put.

That’s so interesting.

I was so excited about the Orwell story.

But I’m just imagining walking in there into the room not knowing what you’re in for and just seeing all these really drunk people just flopping over a rope.

And the smell must be horrific.

Oh, my gosh.

But while we’re here, I just wanted to share some expressions for hangover from other languages.

There’s a couple that are really great.

Do you remember the comic strip, the Cats and Jammer kids? These little cat-like troublemakers.

It’s a German word, cat and jammer, and it’s a German word for hangover.

It means a lamentation of cats or a squall of cats, just a loud mess of cats.

And in Danish, there’s two.

One translates as to have a blacksmith in the forehead, and another one means to have carpenters.

Yeah, and then in France, you can wake up with a wooden mouth or you can wake up with a hair ache.

That was the old way to say it.

Mala shivo.

I like that.

Hair ache.

That’s the big thing.

Right?

You ache right down to your follicles.

Oh, I can imagine that one.

And one more term for that.

If you want a medical term for it, back in 2000, some doctors coined a term for this that has gotten some use in the medical community.

It’s visalgia.

Comes from the Norwegian kvais, which means uneasiness after a night like that.

And algia, which means pain and suffering from Greek algos, like analgesic, which keeps you from having pain.

Vaisalgia.

Noah, there you go.

And tell your girlfriend that she’s reading the right kind of literature if she came across that.

There’s so much fascinating stuff about the world 150 years ago.

Yes, truly.

Thank you guys so much.

That was very enlightening and very interesting.

And now I’ll have a good little nugget of conversation from y’all.

Thank you so much.

Yeah, the next time you guys are working on a buzz, would you like to work on a basalja?

Well, thank y’all so much.

I enjoyed this so much.

Be well.

Have a good one.

Thanks. Bye-bye, Noah.

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